Rate My Professor Manushag Powell

Powell's scholarship centers on 18th-century British literature and culture, particularly historical periodicals, the rise of professional authorship, British women writers, gender and authorship, performance in literature, and popular genres such as criminal conversation, bigamy, and piracy. Key publications include her monograph Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals (Bucknell University Press, 2012), which explores authorship in periodicals like The Female Spectator and The Covent-Garden Journal; British Pirates in Print and Performance, co-authored with Frederick Burwick (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, co-edited with Jennie Batchelor (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); and her critical edition of Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (Broadview Press, 2019). She has published articles such as “Thieving Hooks, and the Stories We Tell about Pirates” in Digital Defoe. Powell’s honors include Purdue University Faculty Scholar recognition, the Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award (2015–16), and the Teaching for Tomorrow Fellowship. As a public scholar and genre theorist, she delivers lectures and teaches courses on the real history of pirates, debunking myths like hook hands and peg legs originating from 19th- and 20th-century literature rather than historical records, and emphasizing piracy’s global scope and socioeconomic realities. At ASU, she advances the department’s diverse programs while fostering faculty and student success.